Chapter IV: Introduction: I. the Text (1)

1.

IN reading and criticising the plays of Shakespeare, we must always bear in mind that they were written for the stage, not for the closet, to be acted, not to be read. Shakespeare, as it would appear, was utterly regardless of literary fame; he had, as we have seen, one sole object in view, to acquire as much money as would enable him to quit the hurry and bustle of London, and settle down in his native Stratford-on-Avon as a man of independent property, and be, if possible, the founder of a family. Pouring forth, therefore, his tragic and comic strains, with as little apparent effort as the songsters of the grove warble their native notes, he set no value on them but as they filled the Globe and the Blackfriars and thus tended to the realization of the great object of all his ambition; and he never gave a single one of them to the press, as was done by Jonson and others who sought for literary fame by their dramas. Hence, though the verse is always melodious, we must not look in them for the finish and perfection which we find in those of a Racine or a Molière; we must, on the contrary, be prepared to meet with all the marks of haste and carelessness, with contradictions and even with absurdities. It would really dismay one to think of their being submitted to the ordeal through which the pieces of the great Corneille have been made to pass by Voltaire. Corneille, by the way, like Shakespeare, valued his plays by the money they produced.

Copies of about one-half of his plays were surreptitiously obtained by the booksellers, who printed them with more or less of care; but of this he took no heed: and when he finally retired to Stratford, he left in the hands of his fellowplayers the manuscripts of his plays, published and unpublished. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that he ever had any intention of collecting and publishing his dramatic writings--a thing of which there had as yet been no instance. In 1616, the very year of Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson, who, widely different from the great dramatist, set a high value, and a just one, on his plays as literary compositions, collected all he had written up to that date and published them, with his other poetical pieces, in a folio volume. It may have been this that induced Heminge and Condell, two members of the company to which Shakespeare had belonged, to make a collection of _his_ pieces also, and give them to the world in a folio volume. For this purpose they used the 4to impressions of such plays as had been printed, making some corrections and alterations in them from the playhouse copies; and adding to these the manuscript plays which were in the possession of the theatre, they put the whole into the hands of the publishers, one of whom, Edward Blount, who was a man of some literary pretensions, is supposed, not without probability, to have undertaken the task of seeing the work through the press. Such was the origin of the celebrated folio of 1623, of which it was, in my opinion most justly, said by the late Mr. Hunter, that "perhaps in the whole annals of English typography there is no record of any book of any extent and any reputation having been dismissed from the press with less care and attention;" while Mr. Knight (who ought to have known a good deal about such matters) boldly declares that "perhaps, all things considered, there never was a book so correctly printed!" Such as it is, however, it and the previous 4to impressions are the _only_ authority we have for the text of these marvellous creations of the human intellect.

2.

Few, I should hope, will refuse to assent to the two following postulates.

I. No eminent writer--however he might obscure his meaning by metaphor, ellipsis, or other figures of speech--has ever written pure nonsense.

II. No true poet ever wrote limping, imperfect, or inharmonious verses.

We may add to these the plain facts, that printers are not, and never were, infallible, and that those works of which the authors themselves read the proof-sheets are in general more correct than those of which those sheets were read by others.

3.

Now the plays of Shakespeare are, as is well known, full of passages of which it is nearly impossible to make any good sense, and they abound in imperfect and inharmonious verses. On the other hand, the poems of Venus and Adonis, and of Lucrece, which he himself probably saw through the press, are almost entirely free from error, and do not contain a single unmelodious verse. The natural inference, then, is, that the defects of the plays are all owing to the transcribers and printers, and that the correction of them and the restoration of sense and melody, when possible, is the legitimate office of sound emendatory criticism. The truth of this has been felt from the very beginning; for in the 2nd folio, published in 1632, only nine years after the first, there are numerous corrections, which must have been made by the editor solely on his own authority, for, many of them being very bad, he could not have derived them from any manuscripts. And the same is the case in the subsequent folios, of all of which there are many copies in existence, like that which Mr. Collier met with to his misfortune, and which has excited such a storm in a puddle,--of which, by the way, my own opinion is that the corrections in it were made between 1744, the date of Hanmer's, and 1765, that of Johnson's edition; whence I only cite it for the corrections later than the former date. These contain manuscript corrections, some, like that copy, anonymously, others by Southern and other men of repute. In the beginning of the last century Rowe gave the first example of an annotated edition of Shakespeare's works, and from that time to the present edition has succeeded edition bearing the names of critics of various degrees of ability and eminence, but all agreeing in the necessity of revising the text and rendering it as correct as may be possible.

Of the early editors, Rowe and Pope made little more than the most obvious corrections, Warburton, always ingenious and almost always wrong, made notwithstanding some that were very good, as also did Hanmer. But they were all eclipsed by Theobald, one of the acutest emendatory critics that this country has produced, whose merits, though long clouded through the malignity of Pope, are now fully acknowledged. Capell, the next in order of time, also rendered good service; but Johnson, Steevens, and Malone have done much less than might have been expected. Of these the last was a native of Ireland, the only emendatory critic that country has produced; and, in my opinion, he is not at all inferior to his English rival Steevens. That true critic Tyrwhitt should also be noticed as an emendator of a high order. It is surprising how little has really been done in the present century; and I was perfectly astonished to find what a number of passages still remained in a corrupt or imperfect state when I ventured on the task of emendation. It would seem as if critical sagacity, low in rank as it may be, is one of those talents most rarely bestowed; and besides, print appears to exercise almost a magic power over most persons; they seem to think that what is in print cannot be wrong: it is in fact only very few minds that can fully emancipate themselves from its influence. It must, however, be remembered that alteration and critical emendation are widely different. The former is in the power of almost any one; the latter, as I said, requires a peculiar faculty. It is a curious fact that in nothing does critical sagacity show itself more than in, as I may say, seeing what is before the eyes. For an instance see the first note on Henry V. Another curious fact is this, that poets (Coleridge for example) are rarely good emendators. It is, in fine, the merest folly, and a proof of the grossest ignorance, to sneer at such labours and represent them as needless, if not mischievous. Editors, however, ought to be very cautious about introducing their conjectures into the text, and should place them only in notes, unless when they are such as must almost command assent, and the place corrected had previously yielded no tolerable sense or metric melody. It is a good rule to let well alone, as we say, and not to alter what gives tolerable good sense. I have, I believe, transgressed this rule only in a couple of places.

4.

The following instance is a convincing proof of the evil consequences of the proof-sheets not having passed under the author's own eye. Sismondi, the celebrated historian of France, wrote an historic tale named Julia Severa, which was of course written in French, and it was printed at one of the best offices in Paris; but the author himself did not see the proofs, whence, though it makes only two rather slender duodecimo volumes, there are actually whole pages of _errata_! I know, by the way, no better mode of weaning oneself from what I shall presently describe as _printer-worship_ than a habit of examining the _errata_ in books printed in the two last centuries. Further, in good printing-offices, at least in this country, it is the practice that the proofs, after they come from the compositor, should be read in the office and corrected before they are sent to the author or editor; while, even at the present day, in the Royal printing-office in Copenhagen there are no readers, and the sheets are sent out just as they come from the compositor, and what that state is must be known to any one conversant with printing-offices. Now it is very possible, or rather highly probable, if not certain, that such was the case in England also in former times; and supposing that it was the editors, and not Blount, that read the proofs, as the wretched state of the punctuation might seem to indicate, we need not feel any surprise at the very unsatisfactory state of the text of the folio of 1623. In opposition, however, to this opinion, the Cambridge editors think that "there were no proof-sheets, in those days, sent either to author or editor," and that "after a MS. had been sent to press it was seen only by the printers, and one or more correctors of the press employed by the publishers for that purpose." But on this hypothesis how are we to account for the great correctness of our author's Poems, Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, the Works of Jonson, Drayton, and others? The following words on the title-page of Marston's Fawne, 2nd edition, offer decisive evidence that authors _did_ read the proof-sheets of their works:--"Now corrected of many faults, which, by reason of the author's absence, were let slip in the first edition."

5.

Notwithstanding all this, there are editors of Shakespeare who, rejecting the evidence of sense, grammar, and logic, obstinately adhere to the printed text, terming that alone _authority_, and even holding the second and later folios to be such; and it is really pitiable to see them superstitiously retaining for instance _'tis_ or _it's_ when the metre requires _it is_, and syncopated forms as _lov'd_, _own'd_, etc., when the verse has need of the complete word, and _vice versâ_. These I denominate _Printer-worshipers_; for it is in reality to the authority of the printer, not of the poet, that they bow. The most extraordinary instance of this propensity in existence is the retention of "strain _at_ a gnat" in our authorized version of the New Testament, a most manifest printer's error; for no schoolboy could have made it in translating, and in all the previous English versions the word is _out_. Yet there it has stood uncorrected for two centuries and a half! Hardly inferior as a piece of printer-worship is the following. A stanza of a song in Fletcher's Spanish Curate (ii. 5) ends thus:

From that breath, whose native smell
Indian odours far excel,

thus expressing the very contrary of what was meant! Theobald, a true critic, therefore most properly added _doth_--in the wrong place, however, as it should begin the line; yet Mr. Dyce says, "the old text is doubtless what the poet wrote"!!

To conclude, then, if the printed text cannot be made to yield sense the fault _must_ lie, not with the poet, but with the transcriber or the printer, and a correction, made in conformity with the language and mode of thinking of the poet and his time, as it _may_ give what he wrote, or may have written, should be admitted into the text. I must here, _en passant_, impress it on the reader as a maxim, that no word should be used in correction that is not to be found in the poet himself, or in his contemporaries.

6.

A printer is a transcriber or copyist, with the only difference that he uses type instead of a pen. He looks at the _copy_, as it is termed, and takes up the whole or part of a sentence in his mind, and then goes on composing or setting up the type. Meanwhile he is very possibly engaged in conversation, or he is listening to that of others, or he is thinking of something else. His mind being thus distracted, errors will naturally arise in what he is composing. Besides, he has very often to contend with the difficulties caused by illegible writing in the manuscript. There is another source of error--and one in which the printer is perfectly blameless--which I have never seen noticed. It is this, that in speaking and reading we often slur over, elide or suppress the final consonant if the following word begin with a consonant; and this is not peculiar to the English, but is to be found in the French, German, and other languages, being in fact a law of nature, the result of our organization. The most usual case is when, as in the following example, the first word ends and the next begins with the same consonant. Thus in one of the Irish Melodies of Moore, a poet more devoted to euphony than to sense, we have

Thou would_est_ still be adored as this momen_t_ thou art,

where it will be seen that the letters in italics are not, and cannot be pronounced, without making a pause between the words. In another song of the same poet we have

Mary, I believed thee true,
And I was blest in thus believing.

Here, if it were not for the second line, no one, on only hearing the first, could tell whether the word was _believed_ or _believe_; for the sound is exactly the same: see on Much Ado, iv. 1; M. N. D. ii. 1. We surely then cannot blame the printer who makes a mistake in such cases, but we should not hesitate to correct it. We should also remember that this suppression or clipping is more frequent with the classes to which the printer probably belonged than with the educated.

It is chiefly the dentals _t_ and _d_ that are thus suppressed before words commencing with a mute consonant; and it is surprising what a number of words there are in common use that have been thus curtailed. Thus in _and_ the _d_ is rarely sounded, even before vowels; _of_ is so generally pronounced _o'_ that it were needless printing it so, as is usual in the dramatists, were it not that _o'_ represents _on_ as well as _of_; we all say "_Who_ did you see?" though we should write it "_Whom_ did you see?" Instances, in fine, are numberless; but we should keep the principle constantly in mind. See the note on _sly-slow_, Rich. II. i. 3; and on _by peeping_, Cymb. i. 7.

On the other hand, there is sometimes a transference of a consonant from the end of one word to the beginning of the next, which injures the sense,--_ex. gr._,

Thence forth descending to that perilous porch
Those dreadful flames she also found _delayed_.
F. Q. iii. 12. 42.

Here the poet probably wrote _allayed_, and the printer transferred to it the _d_ of _found_. See on Temp. iv. 1.

While treating of elision, it may not be useless to remark that when a word beginning with _h_ is monosyllabic, or is not accented on its first syllable, the _h_ is not sounded. Any one who will observe will find that _his_, for example, is usually pronounced _is_; so that there is no occasion for the _'s_ of the dramatists. So we should write and pronounce _a history_, but write _an historian_ and pronounce _an 'istorian_; for _a historian_, as it is too often written and pronounced, makes a most unpleasant _hiatus_. We may observe how constantly the aspirate is suppressed in the poetry of Greece and Rome.

The errors of transcribers and printers are _Omission_, _Addition_, _Transposition_, _Substitution_. Of these I will now give instances, chiefly from my own experience. I must, however, previously notice the rather curious fact, that these four sources of error, which I had traced out in our printed works, are all, and no other, acted upon by that, in my mind, most able of the German critics, J. Olshausen, in that _chef d'oeuvre_ of criticism, his Comment on the Book of Psalms, thus showing how universal they are.

7.

_Omission._--If any one will examine a proof-sheet as it comes from the hands of a compositor, he will find abundant instances of this source of error. One would think that such could hardly escape the author's eye; and yet, in the edition of Ben Jonson's plays corrected by himself, almost the only errors detected by the editors have been those of omission; and a few more have, I think, escaped _them_. I may add that the words supplied by them seem to me to be almost invariably the very words which had been omitted. In Notes and Queries (3 S. vii.) there is a list of the principal _errata_ in the reprint of the First Folio, in 1808; and the far larger portion of them are omissions which can easily be supplied. From my own experience in the case of reprints, I can further assert that corrections of this kind are by no means a matter of hap-hazard; for where I have supplied the words I supposed lost or altered I have almost invariably found, on referring to the original edition, that I had hit on the exact word. As an instance, in a late reprint of Akenside's Poems, the following line occurs in the Hymn to the Naiads:

Your _sultry_ springs, through every urn.

Here I at once corrected _salutary_, and on looking at the original edition I found I was right. Yet, had this correction been made in Shakespeare, we know how it would have been disputed. As to omissions I can give the following instances. In a reprint (Lond. 1816) of Fletcher's Purple Island, we find (xii. 74, 85) the following lines:

Thus with glad sorrow did she plain her.

In th' own fair silver shines and borrow'd gold.

Each line being short, I read in the first "_sweetly_ plain her," and in the second _one_ and "_fairer_ borrow'd gold," and on looking at the original 4to I found I had supplied the poet's very words. In Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, the following line is in all the MSS. and editions,

She hadde a gay mirrour,

which is evidently a foot short. I read 'She had _in hand_,' and on looking at the original I found _en sa main_.

It is not often that proofs have been read more carefully than were those of my edition of Milton's Poems, both by myself and by others; and yet, in the reprint of the text, in one place (Par. Lost, x. 422) it will be found that the word _to_ is missing, thus destroying the metre; and yet none of us perceived it.

A far stronger case is the following. Never apparently was a work edited with greater care than Mr. Panizzi's edition of Bojardo and Ariosto; and yet in the Orlando Innamorato, II. xxiv. 54, the concluding couplet of the stanza is printed thus:

Persa ho mia gioia, e'l mio bel Paradiso,
Per lui che tardo giunse a darmi.

Here a reader, who has even but the slightest knowledge of Italian, will see at once that the word _avviso_ has been omitted at the end of the second line; and yet this escaped not merely the printer's reader, who, even if ignorant of the language, might be supposed to have missed the rime, but the lynx-eyed editor himself, not only in the proof, but in the fair sheets which he was evidently in the habit of examining most carefully. The more I think of this error the more I feel astonished at its occurrence, a thing for which I cannot in any manner account; the following, however, is nearly a parallel. In a most carefully edited Greek Testament (Lond. 1837), in 1 Cor. xi. 23, three important words are omitted! Need we, then, wonder at omissions in Shakespeare?

The omission is generally, as in these cases, of single words, from noun to interjection, all parts of speech included, and also of single letters or syllables. It is rather curious, too, that when a word has been repeated by the poet it is sometimes omitted by the printer. Thus "What wheels? what racks? what fires?" W. T. iii. 2, is printed, "What wheels? racks? fires?" There is another instance in the same play, and many in the other plays. In Chaucer the instances are numerous. Addresses, as _sir_, _my lord_, etc., are sometimes left out, as also are _pray_, _now_, _only_, and others which are not absolutely necessary for the sense--and even two or more words; in all which cases the omission is indicated by the defect of metre. This the reader will do well to keep constantly in mind. For an example see on Tam. of Shrew, i. 1. It is surprising how often the negative particle is wanting in these plays of Shakespeare's. I have discovered its absence in between twenty and thirty places, not one-half of which had been observed by preceding editors. But not merely single words have been left out by printers; want of rime or want of connexion shows that entire lines have been omitted. Mr. Collier observes that three lines are wanting in various places of the Variorum Shakespeare; and such being the case in the present century, we need not wonder at so many having been passed over by the original printers. The reader will find about two dozen such cases noticed in my Edition and in the following pages, not one-half of which had been observed by preceding editors. Shakespeare himself furnishes the following remarkable instance. In Com. of Err. ii. 2, the three last folios omit the two lines beginning with "Wear gold and no man," etc. Nares gives in his Glossary (_v._ Portingall) a curious instance of the omission of a line, which escaped the author's own notice in the proof-sheet. So also in Massinger's Unnatural Combat, lines are wanting in two places, though he himself must have read the proofs. In 2 Hen. VI. iv. 1, there is a line wanting in the folio, to recover which we are actually obliged to go to the original play of The Contention, etc.

Parts of lines, generally the latter part, are also often wanting, but not so often as it may seem; for short lines, and also over-long lines, generally are caused by malarrangement of the text. The main cause, however, of these losses is the ill-usage to which the manuscripts seem to have been subjected in the part of the theatre in which they were kept, and the careless treatment of them by those who had occasion to use them. Hence in some places the writing may have been obliterated by ink-blots, in others effaced by friction, or by damp or dust; while sometimes a part of a leaf may have been torn away. We must remember that a large number of Shakespeare's plays were lying thus exposed to ill-usage, probably in the property-room of the Globe or Blackfriars, for a space of from twenty to thirty years.

The parts most likely to have thus sustained injury must have been those nearest the edges of the page; and hence the part effaced would be the beginning of the line or the end of it; and as the lines run evenly at the beginning, while they are of irregular length, the effacement at the beginning would be in general of mere monosyllables, as _I_, _in_, _with_, _and_, &c., while that at the end might be of several words, at times even of half a line. In the beginning, too--as will be seen in the notes on Merchant of Venice, iv. 1, As You Like It, ii. 7, and elsewhere--more than one word has been sometimes effaced. In the case of entire lines or large parts of lines, the cause may have been their position at the top or bottom of the page, and their consequent proximity to the edge.

It is rather strange that I should have been--as I believe I am--the first to notice this very simple and natural mode of accounting for the losses in the text. The number of these losses which I have, or seem to have, detected in the beginnings is over seventy, those at the ends more than double that number. As they are all supplied in my Edition, and noted in the following pages, the reader will have ample occasion for ascertaining whether my theory is correct or not. I will here, however, give a couple of instances.

In faith, my lord, you are too wilful-blame.
1 Hen. IV. iii. 1.

Here the critics are perplexed with "wilful-blame," which is a compound without example; but let us suppose that the poet wrote "wilful-blameable," and that the final letters had been effaced, we get a compound term of which examples are numerous. The other is,

And made him stoop to the water. 'Tis wonder_ful_.
Cymb. iv. 2.

In the following pages it will be seen that occasionally I attempt to supply the losses of lines and parts of lines. It will not, I hope, be supposed that I am so presumptuous as to expect my productions to be admitted into the text. My object has merely been, by showing how easily and naturally something could be supplied, to make the reader see more clearly that something had been lost. In three places, however (All's Well, i. 1, Tr. & Cr. ii. 1, Cor. ii. 3), I have ventured to place them in the text of my Edition.

I must, in fine, request the reader most earnestly not to pooh-pooh this principle of effacement, but to keep it steadily in mind in reading the other dramatists, as well as Shakespeare; for he will find it a most valuable aid. Among the instances of effacement at the end is to be noted that of compound words of which the last part has been lost. In five places I have thought myself justified in supplying the missing word, namely, Winter's Tale, i. 2, Rich. III. v. 3, Ham. iii. 4, Tim. i. 2, ii. 2; for it is almost only at the end of a line that we ever find reason to suspect this kind of effacement.

In editing the Plays, the additions made to the text should always be marked, so as not to mislead the reader. In _my_ edition, and in this volume, they are always printed in italics.

8.

_Addition._--Of this also we meet with instances; but, as might naturally be expected, they are not so numerous as those of omission. In the following pages I place between brackets such words as I regard as additions made by the compositor or transcriber. As proofs of such additions being made I give the following, from the reprint of the text in my own edition of Milton's Poems.

But swollen with [the] wind and the rank mist they draw.
Lyc. 126.

Which after [this] held the sun and moon in fee.
Son. xii.

To stand approved in [the] sight of God though worlds.
P. L. vi. 36.

From Heaven-gate not [distant] far, founded in view.
Ib. vii. 618.

With Hallelujahs; thus was [the] Sabbath kept.
Ib. vii. 634.

Nor [is] this unvoyageable gulf obscure.
Ib. x. 366.

Against a foe to doom express assigned [to] us.
Ib. x. 926.

To which I add the following:--

And out of sight escaped at the least;
Yet not [of sight] escaped from the due reward
Of his bad deeds.
F. Q. iii. 5. 14.

So it is printed in the edition of 1750.

I may here add that printers have a wonderful propensity to add or omit--the former much more frequently--the letter s at the end of words. I remember having one time had to strike out in a single page no less than five of these ss thus liberally bestowed upon me. So also--but whether owing to the poet or the printer is dubious--we meet in Shakespeare with _whom_ used as a nominative. See on Winter's Tale, v. 3, _ad fin._ In making corrections relating to these finals, our only guides therefore must be grammar, logic, and poetic melody.

9.

_Transposition._--Of all modes of restoring the melody, and at times the sense, of verses this is perhaps the most legitimate and the most certain. I have therefore had recourse to it without scruple; and it will be seen that in my Edition and in this volume I have thus restored the sense or the melody of about sixty lines, of which not quite a fourth had attracted the attention of preceding editors. In my Life of Milton (p. 286) will be found a very curious instance of transposition and omission combined in the poet's own reprint of Comus, neither of which he notices, though he made two corrections in one of the lines.

In Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, the transpositions in the latter part are so numerous that it was necessary to have recourse to the original poem for the proper arrangement; and I suspect that this source of error will be found in most languages. Mr. Brandreth, in his very curious and interesting edition of the Ilias, has made many transpositions, and they are well deserving of attention. His note on Il. i. 18, is "Verborum transpositio tutissimum remedium est, cum saltem, quoad grammaticam, ita dixisse potuerit poeta. Recitatores sæpe verba retinent, dum ordinem obliviscuntur." This most exactly accords with what we find in Shakespeare. I think also that many might be, as some have been, made in the poetic and prophetic books of the Old Testament--_ex. gr._,

"Ye mountains of Gilboa, no dew nor no rain be upon you, and fields
of offerings; for there" &c.--2 Sam. i. 21.

Now surely the royal poet must have written,

Ye mountains of Gilboa, and fields of offering!
No dew and no rain be upon you:

and it appears still more certain when we look at the original Hebrew.

A chief cause of errors of this kind seems to have been the addition, by the author, of one or more lines to a place which he had previously deemed complete, and this addition, having been made in the margin, was taken in by the printer in the wrong place; as such I regard the transposition in M. N. D. ii. 1. Another cause was the omission of something by a transcriber, who, when he detected his error, wrote what he had left out in the margin, and the next transcriber or the printer carelessly inserted it in the wrong place. Of this we have very striking instances in the Chorus to Hen. V. ii., 2 Hen. VI. iii. 1, and Rom. & Jul. iii. 3. As in these cases, entire lines or even couplets get out of place, sometimes parts of lines (King John, iii. 3, Rich. II. v. 3), at other times single words. Thus adjectives change places (Temp. i. 1. iv. 1), and substantives do the same (All's Well, ii. 3, M. N. D. ii. 1, L. L. L. iv. 3). The following is a notable instance. In Massinger's Maid of Honour (i. 1), a play of which the proofs were probably read by the poet himself, we read, "A gentleman and yet no lord," where the context shows that the very opposite is meant. Gifford saw this, but he did not see the cause, namely, that _a_ and _no_ had changed places in the printer's mind.

I have remarked several errors of this kind in Chaucer, in whom, in fact, they are most numerous--_ex. gr._,

And eke in his hert had compassioun.
_And in his hert eke had compassioun._

And pitous and just and alway y-liche.
_And just and pitous and alway y-liche._

That it was a blissful noise to here.
_That it a blissful noise was to here._

In the Faerie Queene, we have

Was like enchantment, that through both his _eyes_
And both his _ears_, did steal his heart away.
vi. 2. 3.

Here, as the riming line ends in _appears_, we must transpose "eyes" and "ears." Again, in all editions of Parnell's poems, from the first (edited by Pope), we read in the Hermit,

Then with the sun a rising journey went,

where both the context and common sense show that "rising" properly belongs to "sun." The original printer, however, joined it with "journey," and he has been, of course, duteously followed by his successors, while editors never seem to have discerned the incongruity.

In the edition of Akenside above mentioned, I met with

Of triangle or circle, cube or cone,

where it is quite plain that the two first substantives had changed places in the printer's mind.

Surely Wordsworth did not write

I did not hunt after nor greatly prize.
Prelude, ed. 1858.

In a proof-sheet of my Edition, I found

And leave your brother speed to gos elsewhere.
3 Hen. VI. iv. 1.

In Troilus and Cressida, v. 2, there is a passage to which transposition, and it alone, gives sense. It is difficult to see how the printer could have made such a jumble; and yet it is manifest that he must have done so. There is, however, as I have shown in my note on the place, just such another in the play of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which the editors have made no attempt at correcting. In the following passage of Chaucer,

Tooke my horse and forthe I went,
Oute of my chaumbre; I never stent.
Book of the Duchesse.

I would read

Oute of my chaumbre forthe I went,
And tooke my hors; I never stent.

In the same poet's Romaunt of the Rose, we have the following passage, unnoticed by any editor,

Thine armys shalt thou sprede abrode
As man in warre were forweriede,

where in the first line we should read "abrode sprede," and in the second reject "were" as an addition of the copyist. An exactly similar transposition occurs in a later part of that poem.

10.

_Substitution._--"He who has not repeatedly observed how a copyist, from inattention, sets down a word which his mind has presented to him instead of that which is before his eyes, must have seen little of copies of print or manuscript." These are the words of a Spanish writer, and they are of universal application. I remember myself once, with Herodotus before my eyes, writing _Sestos_ for _Abydos_; and the changes I have made in copying passages for this work have amazed me. In Corneille's play of Rodogune (i. 1), we read _enlever_ where the proper word is _élever_, and Voltaire justly suspected that it was an error of the original printer. Further on the reader will meet with a similar error in the original edition of Tasso's Gerusalemme.

The most ordinary case of substitution seems to be that of synonyms; at least there is none to which I have been so subject myself. In giving examples I will commence with Spenser.

A yearly solemn feast she wonts to _make_.
F. Q. ii. 2. 42.

Now, as the rimes are _hold_, _told_, the poet must have written, or have intended to write, _hold_.

That doth against the dead his hand uprear.
Ib. ii. 8. 29.

Here the word must have been _upheave_, the rimes being _leave_, _cleave_, _bereave_.

When walking through the garden them she _spied_.
Ib. iii. 6. 40.

As the rimes are _law_, _draw_, we must of course read _saw_.

Of finest gold. The fifth game was a great new standing _bowl_,
To set down both ways. These brought in, Achilles then stood up.
Chapman, Iliads, xxiii. 249.

The right word, it is quite plain, is _cup_.

Or painful to his slumbers; easy, _sweet_,
And as a purling stream, thou son of Night.
Fletch. Valentinian, v. 2.

Here, as it has been shown, the proper word is _light_; yet Mr. Dyce has not ventured to receive it.

Mi si scoperse; onde mi nacque un _ghiaccio_
Nel core, ed evvi ancora,
E sarà sempre, fin ch'io le sia in braccio.

My late friend Rossetti, in copying out this passage of Petrarca in his Amor Platonico, etc., wrote _gelo_ for _ghiaccio_, and never saw the error, even in reading the proof; and so it is printed.

On the other hand, the adjacent or riming lines sometimes terminate in the same word. There are many instances in Shakespeare, and I have met with the following in Italian.

Ciascun de' cavalieri ebbe _e sergenti_
Ed al servizio suo donne _e sergenti_.
B. Tasso, Amadigi, xxii. 67.

where, as the rimes show, the first line should end with _una stanza_.

Bears in his boasted fan an Iris _bright_,
When her discoloured bow she spreads through heaven _bright_.
F. Q. iii. 11. 47.

We meet also with places where the sense or the metre, unaided by rime, must be our guide in correcting--_ex. gr._,

The round earth, heaven's great queen and Pallas to whose bands.
Chapman, Iliads, i. 395.

Here the metre shows that the right word is _Minerva_, not _Pallas_.

There is one most remarkable case of substitution to which sufficient attention has never been given by the critics. It may be termed _reaction_ or _repetition_, and arises from the impression made by some particular word on the mind of the transcriber or printer, or even of the writer himself.

Thus in a proof-sheet of my Milton I found

A _furnace_ horrible on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed.
Par. Lost, i. 61.

while the word before the compositor's eyes was _dungeon_.

To me _most_ fatal, me most it concerns.
Par. Reg. iv. 205: Todd's 4th edit.

Here, again, the true reading is _so_; yet, as _most_ makes good sense, if the error had been in the original edition it would in all probability never have been detected. Opening by chance Bloomfield's pretty poem of The Farmer's Boy (ed. 1857), I met with

Till when up-hill the destined _hill_ he gains.
Winter, 173.

We may find in Chaucer--

What ladies fairest ben or best _dauncing_,
Or which of hem can _daunce_ best or sing.
Knt's Tale.

Here for _dauncing_ we should probably read _loking_.

Of his _gladnesse_ he _gladed_ her anone.
Tr. and Cr. i.

The poet probably wrote _goodnesse_.

For though a man _forbide_ drunkenesse,
He not _forbides_ that every creature
Be drunkeles for alway, as I gesse.
Ib. ii.

We should read _commaundes_ in the second line.

Witness the daily libels _almost_ ballads
In every place, _almost_ in every province,
Are made upon your lust.
Thierry and Theodoret, i. 1.

We should for the first _almost_, which must be wrong, probably read _and the_. Mr. Dyce seems never to have seen this; for he had no conception of this source of error: yet I wonder common sense did not suggest that something must be wrong.

The things that grievous were to do or bear
Them to renew, I wote, breeds no delight;
Best music breeds _delight_ in loathing ear.
F. Q. i. 8. 44.

For _delight_ in the last line we might read _dislike_, but I think we should rather read _annoy_; for in these cases, as we may see, no resemblance in form or sound is to be sought. I therefore in Othel. iii. 3, reject the emendation of Pope and 4to 1630 of _feels_ for _keeps_, because it was evidently suggested by the slight similarity of form, and does not perfectly suit the context. The reader will find an excellent instance in As You Like It, ii. 3.

My news shall be the _news_ to that great feast.
Ham. ii. 2.

So the folio reads; the 4to has more correctly _fruit_.

Surely Shakespeare never wrote

To seek thy _help_, by beneficial _help_.
Com. of Err. i. 1.

He that they cannot _help_ him,
They that they cannot _help_.
All's Well, i. 3.

As this error _never_ occurs in Jonson and Massinger, and only, I believe, in the instance given above in Beaumont and Fletcher, and has no æsthetic advantage or beauty to recommend it, it seems quite absurd to suppose that Shakespeare, whose vocabulary was the largest of all, and whose ear was so fine and correct, should have found pleasure in it. Surely a just critic will sooner lay the blame on the printer and the careless editors, very different in this respect from those of Beaumont and Fletcher, who seem never to have hesitated to correct an error when they discovered it.

The resemblance in form above alluded to is of great importance, under the name of _ductus literarum_, in the eyes of Mr. Dyce, and it should always be attended to; for it is usually caused by the attempt of the printer to make out illegible writing. The following are striking instances:--

In Peele's Edward I. these lines occur.

To calm, to qualify, and to compound,
_Thank England's_ strife of Scotland's climbing peers.

That the last line is nonsense was clear to every one; but no critic ever could emend it. The true reading, however, is doubtless _The enkindled_, which flashed suddenly on my mind one time when I was considering the passage. It was probably the resemblance of sound chiefly that misled the printer.

At the end of Marston's Insatiate Countess we meet the following unmeaning line,

Like _Missermis_ cheating of the _brack_,

which Steevens corrected most happily thus--

Like _Mycerinus_ cheating of the _oracle_,

having discerned the allusion to Herod. ii. 133.

It is very curious that the word substituted is often the very opposite of the right word. I myself once wrote--and so it is printed--_diameter_ for _circumference_. In Mrs. C. Clarke's most valuable Concordance we have "humorous _plebeian_" for "humorous _patrician_." I have met with _next_ for _last_ and _none_ for _some_; so in The Mer. of Ven., ii. 2, where the folio has "Is sum of _no_thing," the 4tos read "Is sum of _some_thing." In Lear v. 3, the folio reads

The gods are just, and of our pleasant _vices_
Make instruments to plague us;

while the 4tos have "pleasant _virtues_."

In All's Well, iii. 2, and Taming of the Shrew, iii. 1, we have _old_ for _new_. In a proof-sheet which I lately saw there was a quotation of

The paths of glory lead but to the grave;

and the printer had substituted _life_ for "grave," though, as the entire stanza was given, he had the rime to guide him. Many instances of this practice will be found in Love's Labour's Lost. In La Giovanezza, a poem of the Italian poet Pindemonte, I have just met with _brutte_ where the rime and the sense require _belle_.

It does not seem to have been observed that printers will actually insert words, for the sake of sense or metre, when they have made a mistake. In my Life of Milton, I had occasion to quote a passage from his prose works containing "with a conscience that would _retch_;" and of this the printer made "with a conscience that _he_ would _relish_;" and so, I am sorry to say, it is printed. See on Mer. of Ven. iv. 1.

And stones did cast, yet he for nought would swerve.
F. Q. v. 12. 43.

As the rimes are _deserved_, _preserved_, _observed_, the poet must have written _e'er swerved_ or _nothing swerved_.

In her right hand a fire-brand she _did toss_.
F. Q. iii. 12, 17.

The rimes are _embost_, _lost_, so that Spenser must have written _tost_, making, as usual, a dissyllable of _fire_. That it was not the poet himself that made the mistake is clear; for in

Till Arthur all that reckoning defrayed (ii. 10, 49)

the edition of 1750 has _did defray_.

A contrary error to this is where the printer has made one word of two, caused either by sound or by illegible writing. For instances, see on Com. of Err. iii. 1, Tw. Night, i. 1, Mer. Wives, v. 5, Ant. and Cleop. iv. 9, Macb. iii. 4.

The fact of effacement in the manuscript, on which I have laid such stress in the section on _Omission_, has also been a cause of substitution; for, the original word having become nearly or totally illegible, the transcriber or compositor, in order to make sense, used to give some term of his own. Thus we have _yes_ for _I will_, Meas. for Meas. iii. 1, _yea_ for _even so_, Rich. II. iii. 1, _ay_ for _I will_, Ham. iv. 7, as is proved by the metre. These are all at the beginning of the line, and hence their liability to effacement. See also on All's Well, ii. 1, Twelfth Night, iv. 3, Rich. II. i. 3, and elsewhere.

Finally, substitutions are often quite capricious, making no sense whatever. For "he went circuit," where my manuscript was perfectly legible, I once got "_the local_ circuit;" so also "_the merits_" for "there an echo;" "_establishment_" for "established government." In Alison's Life of Lord Castlereagh, one of the pall-bearers at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington was Sir Peregrine _Pickle_ (Maitland); in all editions of Joseph Andrews we have in one place "Sir _John_" for "Sir Thomas" Booby.

It is to be observed that _to unto_, _till until_, _on upon_, _though although_, _e'er ever_, &c., were frequently confounded. It is therefore the merest printer-worship to hesitate at altering them when the metre requires it. A further observation is, that even down into the eighteenth century, it was the custom to write _y_ for _th_ in monosyllables beginning with this last (þ, A. S.), as y^{e} the, y^{n} then, y^{t} that, y^{u} thou; y^{r} your was another abridgment; and hence confusion has often arisen. In these plays we have _that_ for _then_ in four places (see on Tr. and Cr. i. 2); and in Paradise Regained (i. 137) we have _then_ for _thou_, and also, I think, in Tw. Night, v. 1.

11.

Such, then, are the various sources of error in the original editions of Shakespeare's plays, the correction of which and restoration of the poet's real sense are, as I have said, the task of the genuine critic, and one in which, except in a very few instances, success is not to be by any means despaired of.

As a means of obtaining it, I would, as I have done, lay it down as a rule that no word or phrase should be employed in restoration which is not to be found in the poet's own works, or at least in those of his contemporaries. It is obvious that by so doing we shall greatly diminish the risk of failure. It is a curious fact, that not unfrequently two or even three corrections are so equally good, that it is exceedingly difficult to choose between them, and that the final choice thus becomes a matter of mere chance. In such cases I think the critic should select the one which is the most poetic and most worthy of the poet. The coincidence of two or more independent critics in a correction is, in general, a proof of its truth; yet even this is not infallible. See on Merry Wives, ii. 3.

For correction, then, the first requisite is a thorough knowledge of the poet's language, the acquisition of which is a work demanding both time and close attention. Shakespeare's vocabulary, as we have seen, is extremely copious, and from his not having had the advantage of a regular education his plays present more anomalies, and offer more difficulties to the modern reader than those of the contemporary dramatists.

In his early pieces there is an incessant play on words; and in his later the language is often very elliptical and the sentences greatly involved. These difficulties are enhanced by the ignorance of punctuation, or neglect of it, with which the editors are chargeable. Thus it is only in very plain cases that they notice the break in sense caused by the aposiopesis, the anacoluthon, or an interruption, of which the reader will find so many examples in my Edition and in the following pages, marked for the first time, and designated by the sign (...). I would particularly direct his attention to Temp. iii. 1, 2 Hen. IV. iv. 1, Ham. i. 2, i. 4.

12.

In the dramas and other works of those days we may observe the following peculiarities.

The infinitive mood is used with or without _to_ differently from the present usage--prefixed where we omit, omitted where we prefix. It is also employed, like the Hebrew infinitive absolute, where we use the present participle active, sometimes with a preposition, _ex. gr._,

Copious in words, and one that much time spent
_To jest_.
Lydgate, Book of Troy.

Even in Cowley we meet with

The sun himself, although all eye he be,
Can find in love more pleasure than _to see_.
The Gazers.

Here it is plain we should use the participle _in seeing_.

In "He is grown too proud to be so valiant," Cor. i. l, "to be" seems to be _i. q._ being; _too_ being apparently used in the sense of _trop_, Fr., _i.e._ excessively.

The passive participle was continually used in the place of the present or past participle active or of the future. Chapman, for instance, is profuse in his use of it in his Homer. Of this, as of the former, we have some remains among us still, but few indeed compared with what our forefathers had. The perfect was also frequently used as a part. past, and of this also we have still some remains.

In imitation of the Latin and French, the writers of the sixteenth century--for we do not meet with it in Chaucer or Gower--used the verb as a noun, as _dispose_ for _disposal_, _suspect_ for _suspicion_.

A further peculiarity was the use of what grammarians call collectives, _i.e._, the singular noun used for the plural. We still retain this in _sheep_, _swine_, _fowl_, and partially in _year_, _day_; but in our older writers we meet with it in _horse_ (Much Ado, i. 1, Hen. V. iv. 1, and in Chapman's Homer continually), _pearl_ (Macb. _ad fin._), _tree_, _corpse_, _witness_, _business_, _subject_, _princess_ (Temp. i. 2), and other words.

Writers of those days--and Shakespeare more than any--were fond of using verbs in a causative sense, as _fall_ for cause to fall, let fall, _fear_ for make fear. In these plays we meet, in a causative sense, with _cease_, _linger_, _neglect_, _silence_, _faint_, _perish_, &c. Thus _learn_ became _teach_, _take give_. It is only thus that "_smiles_ his cheek in years" (L. L. L. v. 2) becomes sense.

13.

There was a peculiarity of the grammar of those days which is now confined to the vulgar, namely, that of joining a plural nominative with a singular verb, _ex. gr._,

That in this spleen ridiculous _appears_,
To check their folly, passions solemn _tears_.
L. L. L. v. 2.

The rimes here and in several other places prove that this is no printer's error; and this construction is actually most frequent in Peele, Marston, and Fletcher--all University men! Editors, Mr. Dyce for example, are in the habit of taking the most unwarrantable liberty of altering this construction, except where restrained by the rimes. This practice is highly reprehensible and should be avoided; for we should give the text as it came from the poet's pen.

The origin of this structure is very simple. In the Anglo-Saxon the verbs made their plural in _th_, not in _n_, as afterwards became the usage. This plural of the verb occurs continually in the Vision of Piers Ploughman, and we find it not unfrequently even in the State Papers of the early Tudor period, in its later form; for, as in the singular, the _th_ was gradually changed to _s_.

In the more artistic compositions of Chaucer and Gower, however, it is very rare. The following line in Chaucer,

As _flakès fallès_ in grete snowes,
House of Fame.